Adventures in PEI and Beyond!: Cienfuegos' Botanical Garden, A Must See in Cienfuegos, Cuba!

Botanical Garden, Cienfuegos, Cuba

W went for a city tour of Cienfuegos, Cuba, about an hour and half ride from our resort.

Our first stop was the Botanical Garden located about 14 km from the city centre of Cienfuegos.

Majestic tall palm trees lining the entrance to the Cienfuegos Botanical Garden

Cuba has a tremendous number of diverse and unique flora and plants on its island.

As soon as we stepped off from our tour bus, we were welcome by carpets of pink flowers on the forest ground.

This pink carpet came from this flower, called Catalina, the national flower of Cuba.

This is my most favourite picture taken at the Cienfuegos' Botanical Garden in Cuba

This flower comes in pink as well as in white colour. A beautiful flower!

The Botanical Garden has an area of 97 hectares, one of the oldest institutions of its kind in Cuba.

The banyan tree, also called the Tarzan Tree by local kids in Cienfuegos, Cuba

It is founded in 1901, by Edwin Atkins and his wife, both Americans.

The Atkins arrived in Cuba in 1899 in search of sugar canes, the island's most precious commodity.

Found of collecting tropical plants, they imported many rare and unique tropical plants to Cuba from countries such as China and India.

The Banyan Tree

The banyan tree, also called the Tarzan Tree by local kids, with its long roots dangling from the branches, grows easily when the roots touch the ground.

Iron wood tree is the tree with the strongest wood which is good for making furniture.

Unfortunately, while Cubans were building the railway, the Iron Wood tree was used widely therefor almost cause the tree to extinct. Right now, the Iron Wood Tree is under protection and not allowed to be cut down.

Bamboo trees can grow to full height in 3 months time in Cuba

There is a good collection of bamboo trees in the garden.

A bamboo tree can grow to its full height in a mere three months’ time, a renewable resources that can used for building and many other purposes.

We learned a lot form the botanical garden's botanist.

Our tour guide for this session was a botanist from the botanical garden and he provided us with a wealth of information about many of the plants and trees there.

Currently there are over 2000 exotic species of tropical plants growing in this garden.

Many of these plants we have never seen or read about in books and magazine.

The most interesting tree we saw was the one with the one with a coconut fruit like hanging on the tree.

It has a top that detaches from the fruit as if someone has carved it off perfectly ; the top falls to the ground when it is ripe.

One of my favourite unique trees we saw in the botanical garden was this tree below:

My favourite tree in the Cienfuegos Botanical Garden - the Sausage Tree!

It is called the Sausage Tree! It looked very interesting with sausage like fruits dangling from the branches of the tree.


The Elephant Feet Tree

We saw a few of this tree which is called Elephant Feet.

The Royal Palm Tree of Cuba has many uses for Cubans

We saw many different types of palm trees.

The Royal Palm Tree of Cuba has many uses, i.e. palm leaves can be used for building roof, weaved into baskets, mats while the wood from the trunk can be used for building material.

This is a very poisonous tree!

The most scary tree we saw was these trees, but I couldn't remember what they were called.

These trees look like a kind of palm trees but they are very poisonous. We need to keep away from them!